A young nurse was forced to watch a home invasion unfold live on her phone while she was working a night shift and her family were asleep in her house.
Jess had just recently set up the home security system to try to find out which one of her children was stealing her chocolate from the fridge.
But an alert on her phone while she was on a break at 1.30am didn’t reveal the chocolate thief. Instead it showed three youths breaking into her house in Hervey Bay, Queensland.
‘So I’ve rung my husband and said to him. “there’s three people at the house, it looks like they’re trying to break in. Get up, and check the kids”,’ Jess told A Current Affair.
By the time her husband Nathan realised what was happening, the thieves had already managed to break in.
The CCTV captured the three men sneaking around the family home in the dark and taking something from the kitchen bench.
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Nathan went downstairs to confront the home invaders.
‘(I) made as much noise as I could as I came out the door to try and scare them off,’ he said.
They bolted out and he then chased them down the street for a bit to see if he could catch one of them.
When he got back to the house he saw that the garage door was wide open and his wallet and keys were missing.
Nathan called police while Jess rushed home to her shaken family.
‘They still have our keys. They don’t know that we’ve changed the locks, they don’t know that we’ve changed access to our cars,’ she said.
‘So there’s definitely still that fear that, at any point, they could still come back.’
The couple decided to speak about their horrific ordeal amid Queensland’s ongoing youth crime crisis.
They want the break-in to serve as a warning to others that they should not be complacent about the risk of home invasions.
‘We thought we had done all the things we needed to do to keep us safe, to keep our children safe and it still wasn’t enough,’ Jess said.
‘They’re not just stealing possessions, they’re stealing parts of peoples lives… like they’ve stolen our safety. You can’t get that back.’
Though the home security system was set up to catch a chocolate thief, it ended up saving the family from a far worse fate.